advanced nescience for dummies; intellectual candy for your inner child if you'll just hop into the white van. Sorry Charlie, we want wisdom that's perverse, not perverts who are wise, although we'll probably take what we can get, as will Starkist now that there are no tuna, but that's a digression

Category Archives: cultural criticism

Post navigation

Summary/overview: One cool guy surrounded by an uptight upper-middle-class co-host and a technical staff that sometimes messes up, with guests and part-time panelists that are either geeks and freaks (male news guys) or babes and milfs.(female news dolls). Female co-host has a lovely engaging laugh but does not cheaply bestow it on the “boys’ humor” that often threatens to undo the whole show. Of course, her disapproval makes their humor all the more funny, supposedly.

Joe = Howard.

Mika = Robin.

TJ = Gary Dell’Abate.

Steve Rattner = Beetlejuice

So far, pretty obvious.

But even Joe Scarborough’s conservatism in a sea of liberal MSNBC-people is similar to Howard Stern’s philosophical position on his old radio show, for Howard was the nagging family guy in a sea of single sex freaks, and Howard was always telling his freaky guests to be more responsible and to grow up and be careful. Yes, Howard was a conservative–a social conservative! (Relative to his melieu.)

Another similarity between the two shows is the imperious, dictatorial atmosphere on the set during airtime whereby everybody is apparently in fear of getting fired by the host or co-host for any kind of reason.

There are numerous other similarities in style and format: the rock music interludes, of course: the idea of a public forum where even conservative guests (celebrities in Stern’s case) will be deliberately put outside their comfort zone; the selective releases of too much personal information about the host, co-host or panelists’ private lives; repeating the 6:00 AM broadcast at 8:00 AM, etc.

But, I gotta say, the romantic photographs of Joe and Mika–soaking in the sunset, napping in the park together, the one with the foot-massage, etc.–that’s original. Howard and Robin never did that when they had a TV show. Howard’s wives would have prevented it.

“When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed…[because]… I don’t have to prove that I am creative.”
–The Talking Heads (David Byrne) from the songs Psycho Killer and Artists Only

A fan of this blog sent a note saying they were glad that I am “writing again.”

Thanks Mom, but in fact, I am not “writing again.” If you don’t see anything posted here, it’s because I have nothing to say–period.

And I refuse to force it–no muse, no news. Why force uninspired verbiage on a world drowning in wasted words?

The biggest mistake is to think of yourself “as a writer” because that inevitably leads to the mistaken notion that “Shit, I’m a writer–I need to write something.”

Wrong!

Rather, there are people with something to say some of the time, and there are people who never have anything to say publicly, and the former is not any better than the latter, and no one–no one!–ever has something worth publicizing all the time.

If you have to force yourself to write something, imagine how excruciating it’s going to be for us to have to read it! And think of all the genuinely inspired writing that you could be drowning out by forcing your uninspired verbiage upon us.

So think of writer’s block as a muse of its own, a muse that inspires us to shut the fuck up.

• The economic recovery under Obama leads to a new Yuppie ethos among the young which leads to new life for the Republicans.

• Embrace, but do not kiss, at least not in public, the Log Cabin crowd, especially the super-classy ones (avoid photo ops with the bears). Everyone knows that fashion follows the gay community and young people follow fashion. And that leads to–

• Don’t you wish America had its own Downton Abbeys? Then vote Republican!

◊ Because you can’t have classy without classes.

◊ Remember: the elegance is worth the wealth disparity. Besides, the sophistication and refinement more than makes up for the unlivable wages that are its foundations.

To sum up: the GOP needs to go stealthy, go classy, go gay (the right kind of gay) and wait for the culture to swing back towards the Yuppie-ism that always afflicts the children who come of age following sharp recessions. They see the older age-set suffering through a recession and they get all Scarlett O’Hara about it.

I try not to despise the coming generation of neo-Yuppie scum by reminding myself that they’re not even out of high school yet. But it’s inevitable.

How many great songs have been ruined by selfish writers who insisted on singing their own creations?

Bob Dylan: Too nasal, not enough variation in his voice. The Byrds should have done all his songs. Then they could have lasted forever. Had I been Dylan I would have been objective and humble enough to give all my songs to them and other artists. Also, I would have had a hard time understanding myself when I spoke, but that’s just me, or me being Dylan.

Frank Zappa: Sounds too much like Bill Murray’s 1970’s lounge singer from Saturday Night Live. “Those Crazy Star Wars” could have been a full-length Zappa clay-animation movie for all I know.

Roy Orbison: Voice sounds like cream soda. He looked like a switched corpse–like not the corpse you thought you were burying but a different one that got switched-in but no one wants to say anything even though it seems obvious to everyone but the bereaved.

Tom Petty: Like Orbison, he looks like a cadaver, but unlike Orbison, a cool-looking cadaver, like a cadaver who just emerged from a joint-lined coffin after a mourner paying his respects had blown some cocaine up its nose, semi-reviving him. ‘Not saying Petty shouldn’t have performed his songs, he just shouldn’t sing them. Why? you guessed it–too nasal.

Bob Marley: Borders on nasal. And what is that dancing??? Far too many tripping hippies have mistakenly become uninhibited by the bad example of Bob Marley’s horrible dancing.

To me, nasal singing among male performers is almost an oxymoron, and “almost an oxymoron” is an oxymoron, I think, meaning it’s like practically the same thing.

Female nasal singing, however, is fine but it can border on too cute. No, I cannot define “too cute” but I know it when I want to punch it.

There are whole cultures in southern Asia that speak and sing more nasal than they have to as a sacrifice to their God. And it works: they get good grades.

Few places are so well symbolized by the shape of their geographic borders as Florida, which sticks out from the rest of the continent like a dangling phallus, a penis-insula waving temptingly to vacationers with money and low expectations.

And so we like to have our elections and our criminal trials play out on national and international television. We like to dangle out there.

We’re slaves to bad fashion and we preserve vestiges of all the really awful ones. We still have rat-tails, Farrah hair, man-pouches, and guys who look like Denny Terrio.

And we still have Denny Terrio. Or do we? It’s so hard to tell when he’s not around.

Nationwide criminal pursuits often start or end here. Yeah we bad. And we still use those 80’s expressions.

The celebrities we produce are the kind of celebrities you could have a beer with. And collect reward money too.

Life really is like TV down here in Florida. Good families live like the Brady Bunch or 7th Heaven and bad families can be seen on Lifetime, Court TV, Oprah TV, etc.

Think of us as a filter for California culture. Like a liver.

But you have to remember that all Florida isn’t Florida. There’s Florgia, Floribama, and then there’s Florida. The first two are more like Georgia and Alabama than they are Florida. There’s even a Florissippi, where even though geographically Florida doesn’t border Mississippi, mentally they do.

Be that as it may, the future for Florida looks to be more and more extroverted and exhibitionist as its Latin population explodes with rhythm.

Florida may rejoin the Caribbean as its natural sphere of interaction, but it will always stick out and demand cheap attention.

If you could write the world’s greatest literature (or create the world’s greatest art) on the condition that no one would ever know about it, OR you could write/create the world’s 50th greatest art-lit and everyone would know about it, which would you choose?

My hunch is that most art-litters would take the 50th best spot.

Meaning we’re all just a bunch of publicity whores and no one’s a true artist.

God the truth is so painful!

But here’s where Anthropology [trumpets] can save you yet again:

Anthro-Geek: “All this proves is the communicative nature of culture, not any deficiency of character on the part of artists and writers, or of humanity in general.”

God the truth is so boring!

Damn you Anthro-Geek, I had a good blanket condemnation going on! Do you realize what people will give for a good blanket condemnation of other people? Now all I have is this mushy-but-obviously-correct sense of tolerance and understanding.

And that’s got no fucking edge at all! None!

Anthro-Geek: “As progress is made in the social sciences and filtered out into general society it is natural that new aesthetic standards will arise which require less reliance on the stereotypes, pejoratives, and biases that have been previously debunked by the social sciences.”

Once again, it’s all about the women’s vote. Just like every presidential election!

It’s sexist to think of women as vacillating and indecisive, as emotional and lacking information, and favoring style over substance.

And yet apparently it’s almost “science” to say such things about women voters, at least in presidential elections.

I’m sick of every election being about the last-minute impulses of Soccer Moms and Security Moms and Swing Moms.

Sick of it, and resigned to it.

But I can still dream: Let’s have new voter groups–what about the Haters vote? Are people who hate life breaking for Romney or Obama?

And how is that Awkward vote shaping up?

Did you know that Obama won the first debate among Shy voters?

Of course, you know what would happen–even if we did have these new improved voter categories, presidential elections would still come down to the last-minute vacillations of the Hater Moms, the Awkward Moms, and the Shy Moms:

“He came across as rude, and therefore I’m gonna vote for guns over butter this year.”

Some things will never change, including the things most subject to change.

Whenever I see a new ad for a pharmaceutical medicine I immediately start taking it just so I can join the inevitable class-action lawsuit that follows. Side effects may include a butt-load of money.

I deliberately don’t have a cell phone or tools in my car so I never have to stop and help stranded motorists. In fact, if I did stop and offer my useless condolences, my parked car would only dissuade good Samaritans from stopping to provide real help. I’m doing them a huge favor by speeding by.

In third grade I found a dollar on the floor and kept it even after there was a public announcement saying that this poor kid had lost his lunch money. Later they brought him into our gym class crying and I still didn’t come forward. The irony is he turned out to be a dick and I’m a helluva guy.

So you never know with kids.

I’ve billed for bathroom time. Because it’s nice to have your shit paid for. Especially if it’s a big firm or client that you see advertised everywhere: “TransAmerica? I took a dump for them once.”

I’ve read very few of the documents I’ve signed. On the internet, I’ve “agreed” to all sorts of shit I have no idea about. So take my conflicting loyalty oaths to the Kurdish PKK and the government of Turkey with a grain of salt.

Whenever I make a charitable pledge, I only pay half of the amount I pledged. The rest is my profit.

All political systems are repressive, some more than others. But repression is inevitable. Politics is the distribution of repression, so let us not evaluate political systems in terms of how they distribute “rights” but rather how they distribute pain.

“Rights” are aspirational but pain is all too real. “Rights” are fuzzy around the edges, and often conflict with each other. But Pain is clear, distinct, quantifiable, and all-too-cumulative. Very rarely does one form of suffering get in the way of another form.

And yet, we don’t seem to have gotten it quite right. Our recipes for repression are not optimal. Those who might object on behalf of democracy’s alleged greatness are often the first to bewail the imminent demise of the system. Freedom and Democracy, it seems, are always in peril, embodying in reality the oxymoron of “eternal peril” invented in jest by Monty Python.

So even if freedom and democracy are the best of the worst, at the very least they deserve to be relieved of their absurdly eternal peril.

The answer I propose is that we have not repressed the right people. If we repress the right people in the right way for the right period of time, the rest of us can live in the most splendid, un-imperilled freedom the world has never known.

Humankind’s political choices are this: all of the people can be free some of the time, or some of the people can be free most of the time. Democracy chooses the first option. I modestly propose the second.

The reason the second option has a bad name now is because of its unfortunate association with kings, dictators, military juntas, aristocracies and police states. They all made the same mistake—they allotted freedom and repression in pretty much the same measure for the entire lifetimeof the individual subject/citizen—born to the manor, buried in the mausoleum.

Big mistake! What we need is a system of freedom and repressions attuned to the demographic age group of its citizens. Forget privilege and power based in any way on birth. Rather, privilege and power based on birth plus forty laps around the sun!

The obvious solution which has so far eluded us is to harshly repress the young, especially young men. If young people, especially men, lived under a police state the rest of us could live in a wildly free neo-hippie paradise. It wouldn’t even have to be “neo-hippie” it would be that chill.

Who commits crimes? Who commits terrorism? Who drives like shit? Young people, young people, young people. Especially men. The radical feminists are right, there’s no point arguing with them–insurance companies don’t, so neither should you. (In fact, there’s no point arguing with any radical system of thought—simply give in and submit to its critique and it goes away, like the Viet Cong, but that’s a digression…)

Male violence is the fundamental problem of every society. Fraud and corruption are secondary, and only slightly less male-dominated.

Whoring may be the oldest profession, but at least it was a profession. All in all, it seems like honest work. Male violence, however, is the oldest racket, and it has been perpetuating itself like a useless computer virus for much too long now. How long must we pay men to protect us from other men?

The radical feminists make only one mistake—they do not distinguish between “men” and men who have had their scalps disappear and dicks soften. In addition to lower testosterone (the world’s most dangerous drug), the latter tend have extensive family and social obligations which simply do not restrain the deluded thinking of 18-year-olds.

Eighteen year old men have a mindset designed for charging machine-gun nests: I’m special and I’ll live forever and the rules of common sense don’t apply to me.

Whereas the wisdom of age tells the senior conscript that adversaries become allies when the war ends, even Nazis and Commies, so why not just spray bullets around until each side runs out of ammo and the commanders are forced to withdraw?

This wisdom must be kept from the young (sh!), lest they fail to charge machine guns nests when we really really need them to, so already we’re talking about a police state in terms of information and censorship.

The mentality of 18 year olds is a wild resource which society must occasionally deploy and therefore must perpetually control. Like a pit bull. It is not something to be emulated by the broader culture, nor, given its admitted recklessness, does it seem particularly eligible for the so-called Rights of Man.

We should recast the Rights of Man as the Rights of Quadragenaria—forty laps around the sun (thirty for women, sorry, too bad dudes) and you’re in—full inalienable rights and participation with near-diplomatic immunity and with very little juridical supervision or surveillance, much less anything even resembling the Patriot Act.

Until then, make darn sure you’re papers are in order! Especially after curfew…

And don’t worry about any organized resistance from the youth to this proposed gerontocracy. They don’t vote, they don’t care. They don’t even read important things like this. Even if they did, you could still enact an Enlightened Gerontocracy without much protest because they would delude themselves by thinking:

I’m special, so I don’t need to worry about the upcoming harsh rules of gerontocracy because they won’t be applied to me like they will to other young people…

Previous revolutions have been costly and bloody and often fail to achieve lasting reforms. Establishing an Enlightened Gerontocracy, however, requires only the mellowest of revolutions against the world’s most privileged caste of people, so privileged they don’t even know it—the young and healthy.

The history of America proves you don’t need religious conflict to start a good war. ‘Cuz we’re advanced.

What did the atheist say when he finally met God?

–Oh good, I was wrong

What did the True Believer say when he met God?

–Oh shit, I was really wrong!

One day, an atheist was struggling with his moral conscience over what to do in a particularly ugly situation. Then he remembered there’s no God and no accountability so fuck it! Wheh-hew!

Why are atheists so smart?

–They’re constantly reevaluating.

Why do atheists live in cities?

–Because they’re all they got.

Why are atheists more virtuous than theists?

–Guilty conscience.

Did you hear that Science disproves God?

–Sure, just take Boyle’s law, multiply it against Bernoulli’s Principle, divide by the second law of thermodynamics, add in General Relativity and Mendel’s laws of inheritance and you’ll find a dead god in the bottom of your test-tube every time.

Windows is a bad name for a product. Looking at a window either means you’re indoors bored or you’re outdoors pervin’. Oh yeah, and they break.

Windows are too much like people. They get dirty. They get fat under high humidity and lack of exercise. Windows need clothes. What else in the house besides you needs to wear a frilly skirt all the time?

Windows need blinds and curtains and screens and tinting and locks and alarms and brave-but-doomed men to scrub them 200 feet in the air.

And glass isn’t even a reliable solid–pure science tells us it’s just a lazy-ass liquid that hasn’t gotten around to spilling yet.

How much human blood has been shed over glass? (None by me–I think with my feet, thank you. But other people. Oafs.)

And don’t forget Kristallnacht. Those were windows.

Instructive riddle: What’s the opposite of “safety glass?”

Glass.

Windows are for prisoners. And un-adopted puppies. For annoying insects that want to invade at night.

Successful executives turn their backs on windows in order to do their best desk-work. By contrast, I was only a B+ student because of windows.

Boats won’t even call their windows windows, that’s how bad a name windows has.

The happiest people on earth in the pre-modern era–the Eskimo, Navajo, Plains Indians, Arab Bedouins, and Siberians–all lived without windows. Now they’re miserable.

The Anasazi had windows and disappeared. Because they knew.

Scientific instruments (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) only use windows that are round and curved and distorted–i.e., useful only to the extent that they do not function like a normal “good” window. Give a scientist a rectangular plane of perfectly flat glass and he’ll say “What they fuck am I going to do with this?”

Windows kill birds. They make us look fat. They’re the weakest part of the bathysphere. They look creepy on old abandoned houses. They look even creepier on some old un-abandoned houses!

Worst of all, having big ones supposedly prevents you from throwing those helpful stones your neighbors need to improve their lives or just leave.

The greatest looking-out-the-window thought was never recorded, but if it had been, it probably wouldn’t have been much better than “I bet it’s also raining on the houses of the unjust… Man, I wish they’d move out!”

People think they like windows. They don’t. They just hate walls more. And that’s why windows wear clothes.